Free The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps by Michel Faber

little notebook while Mack listened intently. He leaned very close to her, his cheek almost brushing her shoulder, but then it was quite noisy in the café, as the staff and other customers were watching American soap operas on an elevated TV.
    â€˜ So, I resolved only to strangle her ,’ she declaimed, while third-rate actors spat fake bile at each other overhead.
    But, God help me, my thumbes became weak, & made no mark upon her flesh, or none that did not fade straightway afterward. These same hands, which have slashed deep into the hide of a Whale, which have lifted barrels heavier than a man; these hands which, even in my latter years of feebleness, could cleave a log in twain with a single ax blow – these hands could not put upon her pale and tender neck the bruises that would save her. I fancied I could hear her voice, already condemn’d to inhabit the wilds of Perdition, crying to me, imploring me to act afore the alarum be raised, and she be found, naked and ripe for Damnation. Nothing, only I, stood betwixt her helpless soul and the worst of Fates. I did but pause to cover her with a blanket, then hurried to fetch my knife
    Siân put the notepad down, lifted her coffee-cup to her lips.
    â€˜Wow,’ said Mack, grinning broadly. ‘Talk about coitus interruptus …’
    She sipped the hot brew, troubled by her inability to judge the aptness – or offensiveness – of this remark. Seen in one light, it was a flash of wit only a prude would object to (and after all, he was a doctor), but in another light, it was gruesomely, outrageously off. From one light to another she veered, and the moment passed, and she was silent. With Patrick, too, she’d become unable to stop her morality dispersing into his.
    â€˜You know what we should do?’ he said, stabbing his fork into a wodge of chocolate cake. ‘We should sell this story to the press.’
    We? she thought, before replying: ‘The press? What press? The Whitby Gazette ?’ Only a few minutes before, he’d been leafing through the café’s free papers, chortling, in his smug London way, at local place names like Fryup, and inventing preposterous news stories for the Gazette , such as an outbreak of psittacosis amongst homing pigeons. ‘Chief Inspector Beaver is investigating claims that the deadly bacterium was purchased from an unscrupulous doctor,’ he’d intoned, poker-faced, ‘by Mister Ee-Bah-Goom of the Whitby Flying Club, as part of a cunning plan to employ germ warfare against his rivals.’ She’d laughed despite herself.
    â€˜You do think small, don’t you?’ he gently disparaged her now. ‘I’m thinking of a big colour feature in one of the major national supplements – The Sunday Times , maybe, or the Telegraph .’
    She was pricked to anger by his condescension; she felt that, after all she’d seen at Patrick’s side, she wasn’t a total innocent in the big bad world of newspapers.
    â€˜Do you think they care? Look at the way they’ve ignored our dig at the abbey! To get a major newspaper interested nowadays, you virtually have to dig up King Arthur’s round table, or a previously unknown play by Shakespeare.’
    â€˜Not at all. This is murder. Murder sells.’
    She knew he was right, but felt compelled to keep arguing anyway. The thought of her beautiful 18th-century manuscript, which she was so lovingly unpeeling from itself, being splashed across the pages of a throwaway Sunday supplement, made her sick.
    â€˜It’s a very, very out-of-date murder,’ she said, hoping a cynical, jocular tone would score with him. ‘Way past its use-by date.’
    He laughed, and leaned across the table, staring straight into her eyes.
    â€˜Murder never goes off,’ he said, and, leaning further still, he kissed her on the cheek, right near the edge of her lips.
    Siân closed her eyes, praying for guidance as